The recent proliferation of Wi-Fi® access points in wireless local area networks (WLANs) has made it possible for positioning systems to use these access points for position determination, especially in areas where there are a large concentration of active Wi-Fi access points (e.g., urban cores, shopping centers, office buildings, sporting venues, and so on). For example, a wireless device such as a cell phone or tablet computer may use the round trip time (RTT) of signals exchanged with an access point (AP) to determine the distance between the wireless device and the AP. Once the distances between the wireless device and three APs having known locations are determined, the location of the wireless device may be determined using trilateration techniques.
It would be desirable to determine the location of a wireless device using a fewer number of other devices as reference points without sacrificing accuracy.